Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #982572 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 512 pages

From Amazon.com
Located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Zingerman's is a food emporium specializing in top-quality products. One of the store's founding partners, Ari Weinzweig, is also the author of Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating, a key to the pleasures of the best breads, cheeses, olive oil, chocolate, and more, complete with 130 recipes. Like his store (whose name is a fanciful evocation of old-world delis), Weinzweig is committed to the best. Why? "Ultimately, I could care less whether food is fancy," he writes. "I just want it to taste good." The better food tastes," he says, "the more zing [in your] daily routine." A too modest claim for the pleasures of getting to know your food

Beginning with an exploration of the why and how of better ingredients (if you think you can't recognize them, Weinzweig offers "eating experiments," such as trying supermarket Swiss cheese versus a well-aged Gruyère), and other help (like "Saffron Superstitions Skewered"). He then presents food profiles--such as those for oils, olives, and vinegars, and grains and rices--with notes on production and exemplary types, brand information and other what-to-look for info, plus suggestions for use. For example, readers learn about Italian rices such as arborio and carnaroli; discover how to recognize their impostors (look for the seal of the rice growers consortium); take a visit to a venerable rice grower; then receive thorough advice on risotto making. Simple, flavorful recipes that highlight food items, such as Roquefort and Potato Salad, Pasta with Pepper and Pecorino, and Buckwheat Honey Cake, follow. In addition, Weinzweig also offers timelines like that for chocolate, plus technical tips such as those for brewing tea successfully. As sensible as it's informative, the book's a true blueprint for discovery. --Arthur Boehm

From Publishers Weekly
Weinzweig is a founding partner of Zingerman's, a famed Ann Arbor, Mich., deli. His guide instructs on how to shop, not how to cook, and he opens up a world of gourmet particulars: he tells not just how to select a good olive oil or a real balsamic vinegar from the thousands on the shelf, but explains the differences among varietal honeys like chestnut, eucalyptus and lemon blossom; hot-smoked and cold-smoked salmon; Spanish and Iranian saffron; dry-cured and brine-cured olives. Weinzweig, who has a certifiable obsession with artisanal products, is at his best describing the often painstaking processes that transform raw ingredients into culinary phenomena. If globalization has made many imported foods both more available and less authentic, Weinzweig's paeans to San Daniele prosciutto and Cabrales blue cheese do much to restore the romance of the table. Weinzweig occasionally waxes pedantic or obvious ("better fish tastes better"), but his mouthwatering brand of fanaticism speaks for itself. Does it make sense to spend money buying a book that simply impels you to increase your grocery budget by 50%? Well, as Weinzweig would have it, "good food is for everyone"; when it comes to the luxuries of the table, there's no disputing taste.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

WHEN THE VERY BEST MAKES SENSE
Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating:
A Zinger from Zingerman
(When the very best makes sense)
"How to choose the best bread, cheeses, olive oil, pasta, chocolate and much more ..."

By Marty Martindale
Illustrations by Ian Nagy and colleagues

This book is a foodie's joy and a hoot! It's also a very quick catchup if you have been totally out of the kitchen for the last decade or two. It's the Mediterranean scene, not the Asian scene, however. The book contains many recipes, great ones, too.

Author, Ari Weinzweig, no not Ari Zingerman, taught himself to be very food savvy, and he's graciously willing to share his self-taught connoisseurship methods through this book. Though a Chicago native, Ari went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Michigan where he had to decide on a major and stumbled into the food business at a the lowest end. Finally he and a partner thought the Ann Arbor area could support another deli, for who doesn't hate to leave their college town!

Many think the original delicatessens were markets selling Jewish/Kosher foods, the loxes, earliest sour creams, delightful pickles and to-die-for hot pastrami. Not so. It seems Germans, not Eastern European Jews, opened New York's earliest deli. Actually, the dictionary definition of a deli is: "a small shop that sells high quality foods, such as types of cheese and cold cooked meat, which come from many countries."

Naming the new Ann Arbor deli was a challenge for the new partners. Ari knew "Weinzweig" would be difficult for customers to pronounce much less remember. After a fashion, they agreed on "Zingerman's" for their Jewish-sounding store name, vendor of Mediterranean delights. They laughed, because the name had, "Zing," and they opened their new market in 1982.

When Weinzweig works to make you a greater discerning connoisseur, he calms you with, "How to overcome your fear of the guy behind the counter." Most of this means, "feel entitled to the sample you are offered," or downright ask for one (else how will you ever learn?). Then he gets scientific and devotes sections to:

1. Introduce yourself to the new food (this can be done silently)
2. Look at it, describe its color (privately).
3. Smell it, "The nose knows what it's doing," he claims.
4. Taste it. Move it around in your mouth, discover how it tastes differently in different part of your mouth. (think like a wine taster ... Legs? Woody? Bold?)
5. Next he admonishes, Afford the best"," (he's not paying).

Weinzweig winds up his connoisseur training with, "Go wild. Taste early, taste often, and above all, have fun!" He then gets serious and confesses, "I'm convinced that smaller quantities of better-tasting raw materials will buy you more satisfaction for the same, or even less, outlay."

Ari devotes 23 pages to olive oils opening with a Greek proverb: "Without oil, without vinegar, how can we take a trip?" His quick olive history is a world adventure. Nut oils are also in, and he gives careful particulars for Pumpkin Seed Oil "Green Gold from the Austrian Alps." His recipes for Tuscan Pecorino Salad with Pears and Provencal Mashed Potatoes are only two of the recipes in this chapter.

When it comes to breads, Ari Weinzweig waxes almost romatically. Crusts are a big thing with him, and he's totally opposed to plastic bags for bread. He even lines out all the basics and fixin's for a fun bruschetta party. His defense of anchovies (two pages) is noble. He offers his Bread and Tomato Salad recipe. It calls for pine nuts, sea salt, Banyuls wine vinegar, toasted almonds, piquillo peppers and other delicious ingredients. Of the special vinegar from French Pyrenees, he states, "It's subtly sweet, softly spicy with a touch of almond, almost a whisper of dark chocolate and a hint of aged sherry."

Ari's section on pasta is as entertaining as it is informative. He ponders your choices between dried pasta and fresh pasta. All pasta shapes have a reason, and he helps you decide what you need for a particular dish. His visual glossary is handy, too. He explains pasta's cousin, polenta, and his recipes take the mystery out of it. No lesser cousin is risotto, or Spanish rices, and he detours a bit for Minnesota's Ojibway wild, wild rice compared with latter-day paddy rice.

Cheeses run the gambit from parmigiano-regiano, cheddar, mountain, blue and goat cheeses. He looks at "Cows and Curds," and the knotty area of aging. He explains Mountain cheeses as "... were created out of a common struggle to deal with the difficulty of life at high altitudes, ... huge snowfalls in Switzerland, Italy eastern and western France and Greece." He expounds on their personality and character. He also answers that thorney question, "What makes blue cheese blue?" He defines many blues from many countries.

Ari's big on Prosciutto de Parma and Spanish Serrano Ham. Besides these and Salamis, he addresses salmon, both of farmed and non-farmed origins. He defines Lox and smoked salmon, as well.

When it comes to seasonings, Zingerman's gets very basic: Pepper-milled pepper, sea salt and that very expensive stuff, Saffron. That's it. Ari makes Saffron read lore like an Italian fairy tale: "Seeing the Saffron harvest..." "Field of Dreams, From Bulb to Stigma, Culling the Crocus, At Home with the Strippers, Toasting" and finally, "Lunch With the Man Of Lamancha."

Vanilla and chocolate get their due. The book includes a very interesting two-and one-half-page chocolate timeline and a section, "Turning Beans into Bars: How Chocolate is Made." Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating gives us much to digest. At the end Ari Weinzweig teases the teas he mentions with three trendy Chai recipes. The recipes in the Guide are excellent and earn their own index.

Zingerman's: www.Zingermans.com
You can contact Marty Martindale at www.FoodSiteoftheDay.com.

Proves There's Always Room For Another Book
As a buff who hunts down ingredients and luxury foods in order to get out of the house, Ari Weinzweig's compendium of product lore is an invaluable asset. It is true that the availability of high-end, interesting prepared foods and ingredients is exploding in the United States, and Ari goes a long way toward making sense of them. There is nothing like treatment in depth when it comes to the foods that make our lives so much richer. We need that kind of detail in order to fill both our larders and our bellies with the best.

Food writer Elliot Essman's other reviews and food articles are available at www.stylegourmet.com

Simply delicious read!
When you are bought up on packaged mac and cheese, Wonderbread and Twinkies it's hard to know what good food really is.
But after you have experienced a balsamic vinaigrette salad with pine nuts and smoked chicken or a pan seared tuna glazed in fresh orange and basil you realize that there is a wealth of delicious food out there once you start looking past the boxes of Hamburger Helper and Lucky Charms.
That's where Ari Weinzweig author of Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating comes in. Ari doesn't care about fancy food. He cares about simple, good tasting food. And the best food begins with the freshest ingredients.
In this book Ari shares his wealth of knowledge about food. He teaches you how to select the best food items and how to really experience your food by learning how to taste.
Yes he teaches you how to taste. You will fine tune your palate.
But think about it, many of us gobble our food so quickly we don't taste it. So we eat more. We eat processed foods rats would turn away from. And some of us become fat and unhealthy.
In this book Ari educates us. You will learn how to select the best bread, cheese, olive oil, pasta, chocolate and more. Take chocolate for example. Ari explains how to check the sheen of the bon bon, the sound of it breaking, the texture of it and the ingredients to look for, so your selection is a delicious choice. He goes on to give the history of cocoa and describes how chocolate bars are made. He also names specific brands to look for like Valrhona, Scharffen Berger and Michel Cluizel. He even details how to taste chocolate so you can truly assess the flavors. Yum. Ari, I think I will try to figure that one out myself!
The book also includes a number of tasty recipes such pasta with pepper and percorino, mashed sweet potatoes with vanilla, dark chocolate granita and miguel's mother's macaroni.
Other tidbits in the book include brewing tea for the best cuppa, when to buy certain cheeses , spotting a good wine vinegar, and much more.
A fabulous read, one you will savor and learn from.

Lee Mellott